The present invention relates to an information transmission and receive method and its apparatus, and an information acquisition method and its apparatus suitable for receiving the broadcasting and communication data from artificial satellites and/or radio towers, more specifically, to a method for transmitting an information to mobile stations such as automobiles and its apparatus.
In the conventional broadcasting method (radio and television) using analog radio waves, the information transmitted from the broadcasting station is almost concurrently received at the receiver and provided for output in the form of voice and/or video images. Though supplemental signals used exclusively for broadcasting operations and other information are added on the base signals, the information being transmitted is merely provided for output at the receiver basically almost simultaneously, and thus, the relation between the operation for transmission and receive and the operation for output on the time domain can be stated as real time.
The advance of the latest digital technologies makes a broadcasting method based on digital signals more dominant in this field instead of the conventional broadcasting method using analog signals. Recent topics in broadcasting technologies are described in detail in “Digital Broadcasting”, Wave Summit Lectures published by OHM Publishing Co. Japan, in which a digital broadcasting method is still characterized as real-time relationship between the transmission and receive operation and the output operation. A future prospect in the new “broadcasting” technologies is described briefly on the page 274 in this book, in which the authors asserts that “Internet Broadcasting” technologies by using Internet will be expected to be developed in the future.
A receiver terminal having a function for storing data is described in the article “Information Distribution Service using Communication Satellite-HK CHANNEL-, Hitachi Hyoron, Vol. 80, No. 10, pp. 47-50 (1988, 10),which implies one of prospective forms of broadcasting in the future.
A relatively wide frequency band for radio waves is required in the conventional analog-based broadcasting and communication method, which imposes a limit for maximum utilization of such a limited resource as radio waves.
Today, several projects on digitization of broadcasting and communication systems is in progress in order to solve this problem. By means of digitization in broadcasting and communication systems, several times larger amount of information can be transmitted concurrently with the conventional range of frequency band in comparison with the analog-based method. In fact, one channel for the analog-based broadcasting systems can be expanded up to several channels in the digital broadcasting systems.
In order to cope with the new age in progress toward the advanced information-intensive society, it is strongly expected to make more effective use of the information transmission lines as limited resources as described above in such a circumstance that the information becomes more diversified and its volume becomes extremely large. In addition, it is also strongly expected that they can transmit and report promptly the information having the highest importance and exigency among all the diversified information.
In recent years, several methods for communication and broadcasting method using artificial satellites are proposed, for example, found in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 11-34996 (1999).
The present invention is aimed for coping with digitization of broadcasting and communication systems, and especially, along with the remarks on the fact that there is a large difference between the information transmission time and the information output time, and that the exigency and importance of the information depends on the property of the information, an object of the present invention is to provide an information transmission method and an information output method both making effective use of the limited broadcasting and communication channels with an increase in the digital information transmission rate and information compression technologies.
In the information transmission and receive method of the present invention, the information transmitted through wireless communications established by the information transmission line using artificial satellites and radio towers or wired communications established by electric cables and/or optical fibers is categorized; the individual information is transmitted in a broadcasting mode in synchronized with the information transmission timing defined for the individual information category; and the information receiver captures and edits the received information and provides output for the service client in the manner associated with the individual category corresponding to the received information.